Edna Landau’s popular career advice blog for Musical America, Ask Edna, is celebrating its first anniversary with a contest. Music career-related questions must be submitted by January 31 in order to be eligible for the prizes, which include a free career consultation with Edna. Those submitting questions have the option to remain anonymous on Edna’s blog. Just send your questions to AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com

Quotes of the week:

You don’t have to practice boring exercises, but you have to practice something. If you find the practice boring, you don’t run away from it, but don’t tolerate it either. Transform it into something that suits you. If you are bored playing a scale, play the same eight tones but change the order. Then change the rhythm. Then change the tone color. Presto, you have just improvised. If you don’t think the result is very good, you have the power to change it- now there is both a supply of raw material and some judgment to feed back the process. This is especially effective with classically trained musicians who think they can’t play without a score or develop technique without exact repetition of some exercises in a book. –Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play

From Martin Luther King, Jr.–Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.